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By Keith SchneiderTHE NEW YORK TIMES • Monday March 4, 2013 3:54 AM

View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoDAVID MAXWELL | THE NEW YORK TIMESLester Lefton, left, the president of Kent State University, and Dave Ruller, the city manager, are providing much of the drive to revitalize Kent’s downtown.

KENT, Ohio — Though it is home to the second largest campus in Ohio’s state university system by
enrollment, this Cuyahoga River city of 29,000 people spent much of the past four decades
neglecting its history as a college town and its place in the annals of the Vietnam War era.

But a $110 million mixed-use development that is under construction at the city’s center is
remedying that.

The project — a melding of more than 500,000 square feet of office, retail, residential and
public spaces — is unfolding across a four-block, 4-acre section of downtown. City and Kent State
University leaders said the development, the largest downtown construction project in Kent’s
208-year history, will outfit the city with new destinations that suit contemporary lifestyles and
spending patterns.

The project will also shift the entertainment and business center a few blocks south from the
city’s aging core and closer to Kent State. The development is intended to rebrand Kent as a
flourishing 21st-century college town by helping to recruit and retain young professionals, as well
as Kent State students, faculty and staff members.

But tight collaboration among the city, the university and private developers is also helping
heal the psychic wounds from a previous era that has hindered Kent’s development.

On May 4, 1970, four students were shot and killed by Ohio National Guardsmen during a
demonstration against the Vietnam War. The cultural and geographic gulf that opened that day
widened in 1975 when the Haymaker Parkway, a five-lane downtown bypass, cut off the campus from
Kent’s center.

Two men, Dave Ruller, Kent’s city manager, and Lester A. Lefton, president of Kent State
University — outsiders when they arrived here within a year of each other in 2005 and 2006 — are
credited with galvanizing the community to redevelop downtown.

“When I came here seven years ago I was aware of the undercurrent around that event and the
strained relationship between the city and the university,” said Lefton, an experimental
psychologist who was raised in Brookline, Mass.

When he took the reins of the university, Lefton said, he became just as interested in the
economy and the condition of the city.

“Why isn’t there a hotel here? Where is the conference center?” he said. “We have 28,000
students and 3,000 faculty members here that spend money. We need to generate some new business in
this community.”

Ruller, who was raised in Rochester, N.Y., said it was not that Kent had forgotten about its
downtown.

“At least as far back as the 1980s and about every five years afterward the city prepared a
development plan that proposed much of what we’re doing now,” he said. “Preserve the good old
buildings. Demolish the bad ones and rebuild. Lester and I realized that it was time to work
together and act like the future mattered.

“It took two guys from someplace else who didn’t know any better,” he said.